Wednesday, 16 January 2019

There have been so many great years making beautiful yurts, but this year Yurtworks is changing! After 22 years of professional yurt making we have decided to hang up the draw knife and turn down the steamer. We are no longer taking new yurt orders*, or doing hire for outside events. Instead we will be concentrating on Cornish Yurt Holidays here on the farm and developing other exciting circular projects which we will announce shortly.

We shall be updating the website over the coming weeks and posting updates on social media, please bear with us - the new phase will be bringing together all we have learned about living in the round in radical and exciting new ways.

A big thankyou to all the lovely people we have met and worked with in this yurty world, and to the customers and visitors who keep coming back. Wishing you all the best for the new year and looking forward to seeing you again in the coming months.*Important news for existing customers. We will still do our best to help and support existing customers maintain their yurts with repairs and replacement covers for the foreseeable future.

Tuesday, 4 March 2014

There has been a lull in the weather recently, almost enough to make you think that Spring is around the corner. Then, just when the first celandines flowered in the woods and wild garlic was in the air, another blustery wind blew through with driving rain and hail, and we were back slipping through the mud again. Despite this, we have got off lightly, the land is not underwater and it has even been possible to get a bit of tree work done between the squalls.

Back in the late 60's they felled most of the trees here that had any timber value, leaving any that were gnarly, forked or badly barked by the cattle that wintered beneath them. Some had been pollarded, perhaps to feed the cows in late summer and are now growing thick, multi stemmed and greedy for any available sunlight.

We over- wintered our cows here in '95 and '96 and the neighbour's pygmy goats used to be frequent visitors, leaping the fence to feed on anything and everything that grew there. Add red deer, roe deer, wallabies and hordes of marauding grey squirrels and it's a wonder that there are any trees here at all.

Natural England suggested we took down all the beech trees as they were not native to the area and they were keen to see a return to ancient woodland species like oak and thorn, but beech trees bring something else to the woods, not least the luminous green moss that coats their trunks like velvet socks.

Although we have decided not to follow Natural England's advise, some of the beech that have been most damaged by the squirrels are starting to shed big limbs. Beech are also notoriously shallow rooted and so we have started to take out some of the weakest trees opening up the canopy to let more light in to the woodland floor.

Some of the trees were leaning over shading out the younger trees beneath

We have also started running our Bushcraft and Nature Awareness sessions here and it is important for obvious reasons that the weakest trees are made safe.

The long crack running up through this trunk makes it ideal insect habitat.

Taking out some of these big old beech will let plenty of light into the wood, giving other species a chance to survive. The beech woods are beautiful especially in May when the bluebells are out, but they can be cold, windswept places in winter giving little protection or cover for the birds and other wildlife. Even at the height of summer they are dark almost gloomy places, shading out any new life that tries to establish itself.

Beech was traditionally used for furniture making up around the home counties, but this beech wood has a distinctly Cornish character to it and doesn't easily lend itself to fine woodwork. It would be shame though if it was all to end in the wood burner, so there are plans to make some big bowls and a wooden spoon or two.

Sunday, 9 February 2014

It is not always easy feeling optimistic in February, the farm animals are hungry, the birds and other wildlife too, are short of food and shelter, and the gales have left the land looking battered and worn out. Spring still feels some way off, but it is a time when the bare bones of the fields, hedgerows and woodlands reveal most and it is a great time for seeing what there is, stripped of all that verdant summer overgrowth.

Daisy the cow tree climbing on an old tumbled down hedge

It's the time we tackle the last of the hedging and fencing work before the birds start nesting. Most of the hedges around here are traditional Cornish* - earth filled, granite faced and topped with blackthorn, oak and hazel. They are a bit tumbled down in places, generations of cattle sensing that it's always greener on the other side has taken its toll. Countless rabbits too, have burrowed into the heart of the hedges so they sag and slump.

Hedge before laying

We are slowly trying to put them back up if they are not too far gone and wherever we can we lay the trees and shrubs that grow along the top. Hedge laying or steeping is a practice that has gone on for hundreds of years although it was never that common in these parts. This hedge in particular doesn't look like much but there could well have been a hedge of some sort here for a 1000 years or more. I like this about hedges, they are easily passed by but like old bones they are remnants of a very long ago past.

S. on the last stretch

I learned to lay hedges with the help of the Devon Rural Skills Trust and used the skills for several years in combination with post and wire fencing work. Back then it was rare to see a hedge laid in Cornwall and if you did it was usually lashed down with orange baler twine. Most of my jobs came from Devon and even then it was not always easy convincing customers that a laid hedge was the way to go. Nearly 20 yrs on the situation hasn't improved much, and although awareness about the value of hedges has grown, few people can make a living from this old craft. My hedge laying skills are a bit rusty so Steve, a local hedgelayer, took the job on.

Laid and crooked to hold it in place

One of the reasons for laying this particular length is to lower the hedge line so the butterflies can cross more easily. You would think they would be able to fly over the hedge even with trees on it but the Pearl Bordered Fritillary is not so bold; wary of heights, they are easily discouraged when they come up against a tall hedgerow.

The hedge will reshoot in the spring

Unfortunately the mechanical flailing of hedges has almost completely extinguished the beautiful craft of the hedge layer. It has also had the same effect on the wildlife and wildflowers that depend on them. Some say that flailing is good for hedges on the general principal that a cut hedge is better than an overgrown one, but there is now plenty of evidence to show that the repeated flailing of hedges is killing off the hedgerow trees and shrubs and the diversity of wildlife that live in them has suffered as a result.

Flailing hedges in Devon

It's unlikely that the hedge laying craft will return in a big way any time soon, as it is not seen as cost effective, but when whole species disappear from an area as a result of flailed hedges how much richer are we?

As soon as economics is the dominant factor in countryside management it rarely bodes well for the creatures that live there. Perhaps the more awareness grows of these almost extinct heritage crafts like hedge laying and the benefits they can bring, the tide may slowly turn. After all, the riches of the countryside should continue to be a reference to the variety of life that lives in the country and not to the money that is to be made there.

* The Cornish Hedges website is a great source of information and includes a detailed history of a single mile of Cornish hedgerow from the 60's to 2008 by Sarah Carter. Her 90 page study soon dispels any preconceptions that flailing is not so bad after all.

Sunday, 12 January 2014

It has been a slow start to the new year but slow, I am sure, is good. We have started cutting, clearing and burning on some land that has been mostly left alone for the best part of 50 years, so there is no need to rush it.

Gorse bushes grow as tall as trees

It is one of those places where Nature has been left to do its thing. The trees have grown tall and lanky. The gorse, moss covered and luminous green, is 25ft tall in places. Honeysuckle curls and twists around the thorn trees. Granite boulders stick up like giant stepping stones in the bracken. Last years nests are cradled but crumbling in the forks of branches. It is one of those long forgotten corners which a large part of me wanted to leave well alone.

Some of the gorse will be left for nesting birds

"But it's no good for butterflies" said the man from Natural England who had come to assess the habitat for butterfly potential. He cast a despairing look over the hillside covered in a tangle of thorn, gorse and bramble. " It will all have to go, it has almost no wildlife value at all."

Since then it has taken a few years to fully embrace the butterfly project on this patch of hillside but on reflection the wildness of this place is not ancient, there are signs everywhere of human activity; the old granite hedges, the leats and tailings of an old copper mine, hazel and oak coppice stools, granite boulders split and cut for lintels and gateposts, even an old hammock made from a fishing net 35 years earlier. This is a place that has known people for centuries.

Clearing the scrub around the old copper mine

And as for the wildlife, the trees have grown up in all their beautiful moss covered lankiness, but it has got darker, damper and the variety of species of plant life, has grown less. Barely any sunlight penetrates even in winter and apart from a bit of ivy the ground is bare and the understory hollow. What I once thought of as a wildlife sanctuary, has become more and more like a wildlife dead zone.

The cows follow the saw browsing on hazel tops and ivy

Although it is a radical approach, any management, that increases the biodiversity of a place, must be a good thing and although the work here is targeted particularly at the butterflies, I am sure that other species will benefit as well.

So now when there is that smell of two stroke in the air and the sound of the chainsaw rips the air, it feels brutal, but I know it will bring more, not less, life to this tiny patch of land. After all, the chainsaw work will soon be done, the fires burned out, replaced by the gentle foraging of the cows.

Tuesday, 31 December 2013

Welcome back to the Yurtworld blog. It is the last day of the year and I notice that posts have not been very frequent. For 2014 we shall try and be more diligent in covering aspects of yurt life, yurt making, yurt holidays as well as the work on the land here that has kept us busy these last few years.

Our 25ft traditional Kyrgyz style yurt at an event on Dartmoor

We had a really good yurt holiday season this year, thanks to all those who came and loved the place and the yurts so much.

The conservation work for the Pearl Bordered Fritillary butterfly is ongoing. Apart from ourselves the workforce is made up of five traditional Hereford cows who have settled in well and are doing a great job foraging through the thick bracken and bramble. Blackthorn thickets are slowly being thinned out, hazel coppiced, and hedges laid.

Down by the river we are thinning out the trees planted in 1995, this is providing us with plenty of material for spoons, bowls, chairs and hopefully a longbow or two. We shall be doing more posts on these crafts as the year goes on.

All this land work has taken us out of the workshop so yurt making has been on a slow burn this year, and will continue to tick over in 2014. I have restarted a yurt book begun in 2005 after my second visit to Mongolia and hope that the photos and research will be available soon in book or online form.

We always used to take on volunteers and plan to start again in the spring, providing a simple yurt for accommodation. The work will be more land based than workshop based but could appeal if you are interested in approaches to the handmade life and working with the land. More details about this will be posted on future blogs and the Yurtworks Facebook page.

In the meantime have a very happy new year, and hope to see you in 2014.

Saturday, 25 August 2012

After years of
living a city life, and feeling the effects of a lost connection with my rural
roots, I went back to live in the country to work with trees. There was no big
plan. One of the more romantic ideas was to plant a musical woodland - maple
and rosewood for guitars, spruce for violins etc. It was a shortlived idea
dreamed up in a Spanish city where trees in their pollarded contortions, were a
decorative backdrop to city life. .

That was nearly
twenty years ago and although the musical arboretum was the first and the most
misguided of many ideas it raised the question early on as what my place could
be in the countryside after so long a displacement.

Green Woodworking

My way back along
this natural path started with green woodwork, which at the time was beginning
its slow renaissance inspired by the late Bill Hogarth, and led by Mike Abbot,
Hal Wynn Jones and others.

Unlike modern
carpentry, the starting point with green woodwork is the tree itself and not a
stack of timber in a DIY store. Learning the names of our native trees and
their properties, their stories and management, about coppicing, pollarding,
the underwood and the wildwood, the countryside slowly started to be more
familiar and less strange. All of a sudden a new world opened out and a walk in
the woods was never the same again.

Green woodwork
follows the grain of the wood, mirroring the natural curves of the tree. It
retains that link with what it was as a tree right through to what it will
become.

Working with what you find growing in
your local woods rather than what has been imported and industry graded,
teaches you a new way of seeing .You learn to use the knots, the awkward bends
of the wood, the spirals caused by honeysuckle on a hazel rod for example; your
eye learns a new greenwood language.

Children of
almost any age can work with green wood; I spent many hours supervising
children as young as three as they whittled pointy sticks with teeth gritted
determination. (Despite the length and sharpness of the blade, a drawknife, if
properly handled, is a very safe tool).

To start with we
didn’t use a tape measure but instead used body measurements so that the chair,
stool or yurt would be made using your own proportions just by taking a
measurement off your hand or outstretched fingers. You could be numerically
dyslexic and still make stuff.

My first yurt
followed some months after these discoveries, and became, without ever
intending it, the first of many. I lived in it for a year and after a short while
people started asking me to make others. Local shows and festivals were the
lifeblood of rural crafts before the Internet appeared and it was through one
of these that a chance meeting led to a visit to the ancestral home of the yurt
in Central Asia.

The Ancestral Home of Yurts

I had heard of
whole valleys on the far western borders of Kyrgyzstan covered with yurts as
far as you could see.This
National Geographic picture of the country that I held in my head was romantic
but wrong. If the Kyrgyz had not turned their backs on their nomadic life
completely, the process was well underway by the time I got there. Independence
from the old Soviet Union had meant that that the export market for sheep, the
mainstay of their economy, had collapsed. With so few sheep it was no longer viable
to spend the summer months up in the mountain pastures in their yurts.

In the
countryside the yurts that once crowded the valleys were now more frequently
erected by the roadside as cafés or stalls selling mares milk (kumis),
watermelons and coca cola.

In the city, the
yurts were often left unassembled in apartment corridors and old garages, and
erected only for weddings and funerals.

The visit to
Kyrgyzstan was followed by two trips to Mongolia to learn about the Ger with
its low flat profile, straight roof poles and supporting poles (bagana) in the
centre, very different from the Central Asian Yurt with its tall, steep, domed
outline with bent roof poles and open central space.

Similar moves were taking place in
Mongolia with a third of the population living in and around the capital Ulaan
Bator, but many Mongolians still lived in their gers even in the city itself.
The connection to their nomadic roots is still very strong and it was not
unusual to meet university students who could whittle from a piece of wood,
spin wool, do embroidery, sew and of course they could all ride a horse, though
most now didn’t need to.

Traditionally
yurts and gers are made from wood(willow, larch, birch) for the frame and sheep’s wool felt for the
covering and are held together with horsehair cord, rope and rawhide. The
animals the nomads depend on and the earth they live on provide the materials
they make their homes with.

The decoration
inside can be plain or ornate, the wood painted or carved, the tent bands woven,
the wall hangings stitched and embroidered.

The interior lay
out reflects a distinct social order, there is a place for women, place for
men, a place for honoured guests, for the shrine, and for cooking, there is
respect given to the elders, a reverence for the wheel,“the eye to the heavens”
and the stove, always in the centre where the four elements, earth, air, fire
and water meet.

The two bagana
(central supports) in a Mongolian ger should not be leaned against. They are
usually made of birch, a sacred tree and are a symbolic link between the earth
and the sky.

The manufacture
and decoration of yurts and gers, the way they are used embody a whole culture,
a culture that has a deep respect for the earth, for the role of the family and
the ways the two come together.

If the migrations
in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan were towards the cities, a move in a different
direction was underway in the UK. Escape to the Country TV, Country Living
Exhibitions and River Cottage recipesfuelled our appetite for rural life as people were moving to the country
in search of more fulfilling lives.

As this interest
in country living grew, so too did an interest in yurts; more people wanted to
buy them, make them, live in them, run schools in them, dance and tell stories
in them, and to holiday in them.

Yurts as nurturing spaces

So if we weren’t
turning into nomads what exactly was the appeal of these round tents? Our
ancestors lived in round houses of one sort of another and perhaps deep down we
find the round space and communal family living, supportive and nurturing.

The yurts we make
at Yurtworks are from wood that has grown locally, and while some machines are
used in the process they are made principally by hand, with the marks of the
hand tools left on the wood.They
are made from ash (the Norse “tree of life “) and although they have some
modern components so that they work well in our climate they retain the spirit
of their Mongolian and Kyrgyz counterparts.

When someone
speaks or sings in a yurt you tend to listen more intently. The domed roof
provides a good acoustic and words are not lost down corridors or your eye
distracted by corners and windows. When you are inside you are properly inside
not gazing out at the view.

Living in a yurt
involves the whole family usually in a single room, and when you share a space
so closely you have to be organised, respect each other and work together. Our
experiences of yurt living began when our youngest was 13months old. The cold
nights of May were kept at bay with layers of woollen blankets. The night feeds
led to fires being rekindled accompanied by the call of owls in the oak trees
nearby, then snuggling under the covers again to awaken with the yurt warm and
ready for the coming day.

Both our children
of 4 and 15 years still enjoy yurt life. The circular space means we are always
together, within sightwhich is
very reassuring and creates an immense sense of security.Opening the door to a diverse and
beautiful landscape,
brings a sense of connection to the earth, the animals here and to our
ancestors. A chance encounter at dawn as a deer listens to the wind unaware of
other eyes watching.

It is a very
powerful reminder that we share this land with so many other creatures and that
we are a small part in the jigsaw.

The daily tasks
can be shared out, the collection of wood, lighting the fire, fetching water,
lighting candles , drying clothes, washing, cooking etc. It all takes longer
and it is no less repetitive than in a house.

Evenings are marked with the ritual of
lighting lanterns, a magical light with shadows dancing on the roof space.
Stories and songs bring a gentle close to a busy day. Adapting life to daylight
hours is a welcome change, allowing us rest time, free from other distractions
which a house provides.The solar lighting, a useful aid when cooking, reading
and doing paperwork is our only source of electricity.

When the manual
tasks, the so called chores, take up more time the distinctionbetween work and life becomes blurred.

This is one of
the myths perhaps, this idea that there isthe right balance between work and life as if they were different from each
other.It has taken me a while to
realise that work, when you can bring your heart, head and hands into what you
do, IS life. Work is not alwayssoulless toil and life is not a questfor some kind of hedonistic utopia.

As the Mongolians and the Kyrgyz
continue on their paths away from their nomadic lives towards the cities and
their own industrial and technological revolutions, many in the west are
starting to journey in the opposite direction to make their own old earth
connections.

If we carry with
us a sense of humility and a belief that we can be a life giving presence in
Nature and not a destructive one, perhaps we shall find our place there again.

Monday, 30 April 2012

I recently watched Tulpan (Tulip) a great film about a young Kazakh man returning to the steppe after his military service with dreams of owning his own yurt, marriage to the elusive Tulpan, and owning his own flock of sheep. It is a beautiful film of a man's determination to return to live on the land, a land of extreme hardship right on the edge of life itself. He turns his back on the navy and the city, to live in this beautiful almost barren plain which almost everyone else has already abandoned, to suffer the humiliations of his brother in law who ensures that this rite of passage is not an easy one.
Other films with yurts....

1.Urga - A Russian truck driver breaks down in the middle of the Mongolian steppe where he meets Gombo a mongolian nomad and an unlikely friendship develops.
2. Tulpan
3. Mongol - A great epic of a film about Chingis Khan's early life, lots of yurts, horses and blood.
4.The Story of the Weeping Camel
5.The Cave of the Yellow Dog

There is also Troy and The Golden Compass which use yurts albeit fleetingly in one or two scenes, there must be many more films or references so please add any unusual, interesting or trivial yurt stuff that you come across.